Oct

19

Riley didn’t crawl until he was 11 months old, and since all the other Internet babies born around the same time had long been motoring from room to room under their own power I was truthfully starting to fret a bit. You know, wondering if he would be the young man graduating from high school by slithering with great grunting effort across the stage on his belly. Of course once he did start crawling, I was like WHY THE HELL DID I EVER WANT THIS TO HAPPEN, because mobile babies suck: they become these horrifying suicidal crawla-pedes whose burning mission is to quickly seek out danger in all areas of your house, then they have the nerve to cry about it when you gently redirect them away from the pointy table/arsenic/bear trap/etc.

Dylan can’t crawl yet, and while I’m not necessarily in any hurry for him to figure out how to do so, he’s in kind of a frustrating stage where he can sort of flail his way around, but his shit is still so hoopty. He rolls from place to place, until he gets yarded up against a wall or stuck under the couch or whatever, and then he lies there squawking furiously. I have to rescue him about 195738 times per hour, while Riley shouts gaily from the corner of the room: “FAIL!”

Tickling is the best solution for mobility-related unhappiness.

And speaking of frustrating stages, he’s basically stopped sleeping. I thought we had just had one bad night due to a runny nose, but he seems hell-bent on waking up every hour and it is CRUSHING MY WILL TO LIVE. He’s also eating everything that isn’t nailed down, so what the hell, growth spurt? Tapeworm?

I never had sleep problems with Riley and all the times I wondered why people ‘let’ their kids keep them up all night (I always thought, man, why don’t you just let them cry — well, it turns out sometimes you’re just so goddamned tired at 3 AM you’ll do anything to get them back to sleep, including staggering out of bed and administering the millionth bottle, even though you know you shouldn’t) have come back to bite me in the ass in a big way. We just got lucky with Riley, we didn’t do any kind of sleep training. Now I’m the one perpetuating our sleep problems because 1) I’m too tired to listen to the crying, 2) the crying fills me with chemical dread and I can’t stand listening to it (I should clarify that this is something very different from sympathy, it’s more like this biological programming to MAKE THE CRY-SOUND STOP OR MY INTERNAL ORGANS WILL SHRIVEL, and while I can let it go during the day [and if I didn’t he’d never sleep ever, he’s a champion nap-protester just like Riley was] I feel like I can’t bear the anxious feeling when it’s the middle of the night), and 3) I get worried that he’s going to wake up Riley and now I’ll have two wailing kids to deal with, and 4) I’M SO TIRED OH MY GOD.

Since JB has no problems letting Dylan cry and can in fact sleep through even the loudest howls, I think the solution might be for me to check into a fancy spalike hotel for about a week or so. I’d be at home for bedtimes, then kiss JB farewell and jet off to 24-hour room service and an enormous, crisp-sheeted bed.

I just . . . had to stop typing that, because the very idea was making me a little weepy with pleasure.

In happier news, JB is home, and today we visited the same pumpkin farm we’ve been going to for three years now. The first year Riley was in the backpack carrier, last year he was just a little guy running around, and this year he’s got a brother in that same carrier. Crazy.

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